Francise Grose at Bunker Hill

The British General William Howe's plan for the battle of Bunker Hill was simple. Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Pigot's division, including the First Battalion Marines to which Captain Robert Ross and Second Lieutenant David Collins belonged, would march against the redoubt and breastwork as a distraction from the attack of the Welch Fusiliers, and the Fifth and Fifty-Second Light Infantry against Stark's men at the low stone wall on the beach. These Light infantry companies would overrun Stark's barricade by bayonet and take the rail fence from the rear by which time the grenadiers would be taking the fence from the front, also in a bayonet charge. With the American left demolished, the redoubt and breastwork on Breed's Hill would be isolated and overwhelmed from all sides.¹ It did not work out that way.

The 52^nd Light Infantry marched from the small depression in front of Moulton's Hill onto the hill where the British force of near one and a half thousand nen had gathered. General Sir William Howe addressed the troops, assuring them he knew they would 'behave like Englishmen' by which he meant he was certain they would stand 'undaunted in the open field to be shot at.' Their courage encouraged, the eleven companies ordered to Mystic Beach advanced in that direction as the sixteen British six pounders began a bombardment of the entire rebel line as a prelude to the infantry advance. To this accompaniment young Francis Grose set out. His company formed in a column near the beach, the 52^nd after the King's Own, the formidable Royal Welch Fusiliers at its head. At the third round the British cannon fell silent. They had been given the wrong sized cannon balls in their side boxes. Fife and drum echoed over the battlefield, the slow tramp of feet muted by the soft grass. The light Infantry columns wheeled on to the narrow Mystic Beach. Ordered not to use their muskets, they were meant to take the small stone fence half a mile away by bayonet, a flying wedge four abreast that would make a concentrated mass assault But they were nervous, uncertain. Of all the companies on the battlefield this day, they alone were utterly untrained in the tactic of a frontal assault. They were skirmishers, not an assault force. Still, they quickened their pace to a run along the smooth flat beach, their charge hidden from the rebels at the rail fence above by the ten foot high embankment, who, in any case were focused on the slow, dreadful march of Howe's oncoming grenadiers across the fields. .² Francis Grose could smell the sudden swift victory in the tangy salt air as the column rushed faster and faster , bayonets thrust forward, along the narrow shore toward the felt-capped rebels huddled behind their low protective wall of stone.

Stark had formed his men in three ranks behind the stone wall so they could loose uninterrupted succeeding volleys at the oncoming redcoats. He ordered them 'not to fire until the front of the enemy reached ' a stake which he had driven into the ground at eight or ten rods distance' (about fifty yards). The British column rushed on 'with the coolness and precision of troops upon parade,' closer and closer. The New Hampshire men kept their discipline. Not a sound came from the American ranks until the first row of the Welch Fusiliers reached Stark's stake in the sand. With the crackling of musket fire, in a haze of blue smoke ball after relentless ball ripped into the British front. As each redcoat fell, another stepped forward to take his place, stepping over the body in front of him, only to be smashed bleeding to the sand himself.

Ahead of him all Grose could see was the column bunching up, man after man toppling under the ferocious American fire. All he could hear was the roar of never-ending musket volleys, agonising screams and shrill cries of wounded and dying men, foul-mouthed cursing of a few well-disciplined redcoats urging each other forward, the soft, trembling whine of men starting to lose their nerve. Almost all of the famed Welch Fusiliers had been wiped out. Now the King's Own stepped into the breach over the crowd of dead along the beach and on the river's edge. They too were decimated. It was the Fifty-Second's turn to step into the withering fire. Instead, they turned heel and ran back along the beach. Screaming officers beat at the running men with their swords. Grose was pwerless before the surge of panicked soldiers, a lone boy standing and yelling at the men to turn and fight, sword waving in one hand, clutching the colours in the other, ankle-deep in the shore-lapping river as Yankee bullets whizzed round his head. No order could hold back that fear or flight, no sword-point turn it. Howe's crucial flanking movement, his plan to sweep down on his enemy from the rear in a crushing blow as the rest of his forces pushed at them from the front was now a complete shambles. Ninety-six men, not counting the wounded, 'lay as thick as sheep in a fold' before Stark's stone wall. The rest fled back towards the boats on the beach. One civilian watching from Boston claimed they had pushed over each over to clamber into the boats, screaming at the tars to row them back to the safety of the North Battery. With the flanking movement driven back, Stark's men were left 'unassailed and unoccupied.'³

1Ward, The War of the Revolution, Vol. I, p.90; Fleming, Now We Are Enemies, p. 235.

2Official Account of General Gage, published by the London Gazette, in Frothingham, Siege of Boston ..., p.287; Ward, The War of the Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 89, 90-91, 94; Don Higginbotham, The war of American Independence. Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763-1780, Boston, 1983, p. 73; Major Henry Dearborn, 'An Account of the Battle of Bunker Hill', in Coffin, (comp.) History of the Battle of Breed's Hill,p. 19; Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause, p. 285; Fleming, Now We Are Enemies, p. 156; Urban, Fusiliers,p. 38.

3Elting, The Battle of Bunker's Hill, p. 31; Maj. Gen. James Wilkinson, ' A rapid sketch of the Battle of Bunker Hill' in Coffin, (comp.) History of the Battle of Breed's Hill, pp. 12-13; Caleb Stark, Memoirs and Official Correspondence of Gen. John Stark, with notices of several other officers of the Revolution, also a biography of Capt. Phineas Stevens and of Col. Robert Rogers, with an account of his services in America during the 'Seven Year's War', Concord, 1860, p. 29, http://www.archive.org/details/memoirofficial00starrich ; Fleming, Now We are Enemies, pp. 246-249; French, The First Year of the American Revolution, pp. 237-238.